David O'Connell

Dáithí Ó Conaill (May 1938-1 January 1991), known in English as David O'Connell, was the Chief-of-Staff of the Continuity IRA, Vice-President of Sinn Fein, and a member of the IRA Army Council during The Troubles.

Biography
David O'Connell was born in May 1938 in Cork, County Cork, Ireland, the nephew of an Irish Republican Army soldier who had been killed by the British Army during the Irish War of Independence in 1921. O'Connell worked as a woodworking teacher at a college in County Wexford, and he joined the Irish Republican Army at the age of seventeen in 1955, taking part in the border campaign near Northern Ireland. In 1957, he was captured in the same raid that killed Sean South and Fergal O'Hanlon, but in 1958 O'Connell and Rory O'Brady both escaped and went on the run. O'Brady became the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA while O'Connell became the Director of Operations and a member of the IRA Army Council, the leading council of the IRA. By 1969, he was upset with the leadership, and he walked out of the council. In 1969, he helped in forming the Provisional IRA after the split of the IRA factions, and he purchased arms from Czechoslovakia to help in the struggle against the United Kingdom. While he did agree with the armed struggle, he also took part in 1972 peace talks with the British, and he was a key ambassador between the IRA and UK. For much of the 1970s, he was on the run, and in 1978 he was suspected in the assassination of Louis Mountbatten, but it was later proved that he had nothing to do with it. In 1981, he gave Bobby Sands the idea of performing a hunger strike to contest parliamentary elections in County Tyrone and County Fermanagh. He died of illness at his home in 1991.